Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure

I have a soft spot for games that exist because a small group of people refused to let something die. Tesla Effect: A Tex Murphy Adventure is exactly that kind of project, funded through Kickstarter after a sixteen-year silence, and it carries that origin story in every frame. The question is not whether it has ambition. It clearly does. The question is whether its particular flavour of ambition still lands in the year you are reading this. The structure is essentially two games stitched together. In one, you wander freely through first-person 3D environments around Chandler Avenue in post-WWIII San Francisco, picking up objects, working through logic puzzles, and occasionally hunting for items that the geometry conspires to hide from you. A built-in hint system exists, but using it docks your score, which feels very 1996 in a way that will charm some people and infuriate others. In the other game, gorgeous HD FMV sequences play out as you interrogate suspects, flirt clumsily, and make branching dialogue choices that feed into a narrative pathing system with five possible endings. The FMV side is where the craft lives. Chris Jones, who created Tex Murphy and has played him since 1989, looks more convincingly weathered and world-weary than he ever did in the nineties, and a cast that includes recognisable television faces gives these scenes a low-budget-cinema warmth that no amount of polygons could replicate. The writing is deliberately corny, closer to Naked Gun than Raymond Chandler, and the jokes land more often than critics gave it credit for at launch. The story premise is generous to newcomers: Tex wakes up with seven years of memory erased, which puts the player on equal footing with the character. Flashbacks to older games appear as actual footage from those titles, so even first-timers get context without being lectured at. The plot spools out through unsolved murders, double-crosses, and the lost inventions of Nikola Tesla, and the middle section holds together well. The back half is where the seams show. Pixel-hunt item placement becomes a real friction point, a few puzzles feel undernourished, and the 3D environments age less gracefully than the FMV. The divide in critical reception, adventure-game specialists rating it warmly, general outlets rating it cautiously, maps almost perfectly onto how much tolerance you have for old-school adventure logic. What keeps Tesla Effect worth your time in 2024 is the sheer handcraft of the FMV production. Over five and a half hours of live-action footage, shot with genuine care, delivered in 2K resolution, remains a genuinely rare thing. The branching conversation system gives interrogation scenes real texture, and the multiple endings reward replay for those willing to push through the rougher stretches. The soundtrack and ambient sound design of the Chandler Avenue hub carry a melancholy, rain-soaked quality that the visuals alone cannot achieve. If you have any history with Under a Killing Moon or The Pandora Directive, this will feel like visiting a neighbourhood you thought was gone. If you are arriving cold, budget some patience for the back half and keep a walkthrough one browser tab over, no shame in it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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